


Every Night I Save You

by Emelye



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, References to Suicide, The Reichenbach Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-18
Updated: 2012-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-02 03:43:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emelye/pseuds/Emelye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John didn’t punch Sherlock, as everyone seemed to think he ought to have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Night I Save You

He could see it on their faces wherever he went with Sherlock. Molly looked just as certain John was going to attack her as she was that Sherlock would somewhere bear marks of a recent brawl. Lestrade seemed to think John was due for a crack-up, being overly solicitous at crime scenes and at the Yard. Mrs. Hudson seemed to understand, but then, she seemed equally eager for things to go back to how they’d been before. 

But John didn’t punch Sherlock, as everyone seemed to think he ought to have. 

The guilt really settled into his bones after a year. After two, he’d accepted what it meant to be complicit in a loved one’s death. The nightmares—well, he called them nightmares—began the very first night. Dreams in which he saved Sherlock. Where he somehow saw signs that hadn’t been apparent in his _best_ friend, signs Sherlock’s _only_ friend should have been able to see somehow, and it was enough. He could talk him back from that edge, or throw his arms around his skinny frame and wrestle him to the ground the way he once tossed Sherlock’s drugged body back into his bed a lifetime ago. 

Once he saved Sherlock at the base in Kandahar, his arms elbow deep in Sherlock’s viscera as he sutured and clamped and packed and suctioned. In reality it’d had been his finest hour. A 24-year-old American private he’d brought back from the brink of death in an inspired moment of intuitive surgical work. But in the dream, it was Sherlock’s face looking up at him from the table.

Once, he dreamt that it had been Irene somehow faking Sherlock’s death instead of her own. He had a vague memory of an inspired speech on his part that convinced her to give Sherlock back to him. She reunited them and he kissed Sherlock. When he remembered the next morning, that part didn’t bother him in the slightest.

He saved Sherlock from an exploding swimming pool and a Chinese assassin and a half dozen cancer-ridden cabbies. He saved Sherlock from bombs and guillotines and guns. Alley stabbings and hired hits. He punched out Anderson and Mycroft and even slapped Sally once, though he did feel a bit guilty when he remembered it later. He always saw through Moriarty and killed him quite satisfactorily hundreds of times over. 

And after it all, every time, Sherlock was there, alive, and John would take him in his arms, hold him tight, and say _I love you_ the way he never had and never could because you can only really say true things like that in dreams.

And then John would wake up every morning and that feeling of rightness—of feeling complete and vindicated and whole—would gradually be replaced by the awareness of his sad little bedsit, his failure to save Sherlock, and how completely, utterly alone he was. 

Every morning he’d reach for his cane and he’d love that little twinge of pain from his thigh because he _deserved_ that pain for not seeing, for not knowing what Sherlock was planning, feeling, going through. Then he’d sit contemplating his gun for a while, cleaning it, loading it, unloading it. He’d consider swallowing the barrel, but the pain was too good, too present a reminder. And if the physical reality of Sherlock’s loss was all he could have of him, John would take it.

John was back outside St. Bart’s and Sherlock was trying to convince him he was a fraud, but John wasn’t having it. And when he—fell—(John wouldn’t say jump, never jump)—John ran, John _ran_ and John _caught_ Sherlock as if the impact wouldn’t have crushed them both. He caught Sherlock. Held him tight in his arms, and told him—

The alarm went off at half six in the morning. The cold grey light of dawn was just beginning to filter through the cheap cotton curtains on the window. Everything smelled of dust. John’s thigh spasmed and his breath caught. 

“John.”

John stilled, heart pounding. 

“Sh—Sherlock,” he replied, voice hoarse with disuse. John didn’t have to think it because Sherlock told him,

“You’re not dead or dreaming.”

And John found himself suddenly on the floor, on his knees, and all the tears he hadn’t been able to find for two years were suddenly pouring out of him. “I failed you, I failed you and you died, you _died_ , and I couldn’t save you, I couldn’t—”

He felt Sherlock’s arms around him suddenly, surprisingly strong. “No, John, _No_.”

John looked up then into his friend’s face, real, alive for the first time in two years. He saw the circles under his eyes, the stubble on his face and the skin stretched like paper over bone.

In his dreams, John took Sherlock into his arms, held him tight and told him he loved him. In the cold light of day, he dried his eyes and sat and watched as Sherlock ate tinned soup warmed on John’s hotplate. 

Sherlock looked as if he wanted to say more to John, but John knew you could only say true things like that in dreams, so John called into work and fetched Sherlock a blanket, then lay down beside him on his bed, took him into his arms and held him tightly.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

John was already drifting off when he heard, softly, “You too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Joss and subtlety for the title, but it had to be done.


End file.
